Tuesday, November 20, 2007
JOINING THE CABLE GENERATION
For years we resisted subscribing to cable TV. First it was because we had a young person in the house who would have been tempted by MTV. But then it was a simple rejection of television in general. The rabbit ears sufficed for the evening news on the nights we decided to watch it.
Gradually, though, as more and more cell phones started appearing, the reception got worse and worse. It became penance to watch the evening news and the occasional football game my better half wanted to see. One day last summer we decided we would take the plunge, and we made that decision with great anticipation of our expanded entertainment options.
First we tried the Dish Network. The technician climbed up on the roof and sighted through his sighting thing in the direction of the signal...and saw trees. Lots of trees. Tall trees. Trees that interfered with the signal. Trees that belong to our neighbors. He called his boss who came out and did the same thing. Then they delivered the bad news. Dish Network was not an option.
We waited a couple of months until U-verse was installed in our area, and the solicitation arrived in the mailbox. U-verse is cable over the phone lines. Great. We wouldn't need a lot of extra wiring running around the rafters. We signed up. The technician came out and installed a box on the side of the house. A couple of days later another technician came out and installed the rest of the stuff. No signal. He drove off and messed around with the big box a couple of streets away, came back and tried his FCC meter on the line. VIOLATION. No, actually something like 288 violations. The FCC wasn't going to like our U-Verse installation. He fiddled some more and finally said he would get the engineers to change something or other and call us. That was the last we heard from him.
We waited a couple of weeks then called U-verse. Nobody would talk to us about when U-verse would be ready to install in our house. Apparently nobody knew. They couldn't solve the FCC problem. We saw a lot of AT&T trucks in the area, so they were working on it; and we kept getting subscription flyers for U-verse in the mail, but the technician didn't call, and we couldn't get an answer from anyone else.
Finally we called Warner Cable after a few more weeks. They came out and installed the wires which made a great mess to clean up, but at last we had cable. Now to learn how to use it.
"Do you remember how to get the list of programs up?"
"No. I did it last night, though. Let me try."
"You are driving me crazy with flipping the channels. You've been doing that for the last fifteen minutes and we still haven't seen a program!"
"Well I can't figure out how to find out when the program I want will be on."
It got old rather quickly. Finally I found a directory online and made a copy to keep by the TV. We figured out how to get the program guide up and navigate it. Sort of. Now we could watch cable. If we could find something we wanted to watch.
HGTV was interesting for a few nights, but then it registered that they must be sponsored by the granite countertop association or something of the sort. If you don't like granite countertops, you are not going to like the redecorating programs on HGTV, because the folks there insist that you have to have granite countertops or your remodeling project is a failure.
The house makover so you can sell it for big bucks was even more fun. The people who went through at the open house always loved the decorating ideas the homeowners had been persuaded to try. Strangely the comments they made were not the sort of comments we made when we were house hunting many years ago. Not even close! No one said "This looks like a dry basement," or "The roof looks new." I didn't hear a comment about the age of the furnace or the air-conditioner. No one even discussed whether their furniture would fit into the room they were looking at. But oh how they loved the new wall color or the clever corny knick knack shelves that had just been installed. I started to feel sorry for the ignorant home buyers that were getting roped in. The garage that had the spaces for two cars outlined in bright colorful paint on the garage floor was just about the last straw of silliness.
My husband gravitated to the sports channels which drove me to the TV in the basement where I could watch Animal Planet on Friday night--the one and only channel I've found fit to watch so far. "Meerkat Manor" captivated me from my first glimpse. A glimpse that I got just recently, only to discover that the season finale was aired while I was in Philadelphia. Who knew cable seasons ended in November? Sunday night even hubby found the polar bear story on Animal Planet interesting.
But the whole point of this diatribe is that I want to ask you how you manage to tolerate the commercials if you have also succumbed to cable? I have given up in disgust and walked away from the set more times than I want to count. Some shows have more commercials than they have programming. So what's the secret to numbing yourself to the hype?
